The Last Illusion

by Porochista Khakpour

  —Patrik Ourednik,

  Europeana

  MCMXCIX, also known as 1999, had been unremarkable so far, she thought.

  There was: the Euro. Amadou Diallo, shot in New York City. Best Picture: Shakespeare in Love (other notables: Saving Private Ryan and Life Is Beautiful). The Columbine shooting. Napster. Time Person of the Year: Jeff Bezos, founder, president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com; Person of the Century: Albert Einstein. The iBook. The plane crash of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Other major plane crashes: Korean Air Cargo, Mandarin Airlines, EgyptAir, TAESA. Earthquakes: Colombia, Turkey, Greece, Taiwan, Vanuatu. Select notable Billboard hits: “Genie in a Bottle” (Christina Aguilera), “. . . Baby One More Time” (Britney Spears), “I Want It That Way” (Backstreet Boys), “Believe” (Cher), “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (Ricky Martin). The world population hit six billion.

  Nineteen ninety-nine was the “International Year of Older Persons,” the United Nations declared.

  It wasn’t even the end of the second millennium or the twentieth century—that was technically next year, math people reported.

  Before New Year’s Eve, it was everywhere—in stores, on radio stations, on commercials, in everyone’s head: So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999!

  Asiya hated that song. She hated all songs that year or about that year. She had started, that year, to hate sounds, in fact; she was sure she had some form of hyperacusis, perhaps even a phonophobia of some sort. She had become easily startled. She had started to talk in a whisper. She was starting to believe that everything, pretty much, was wrong with everything.

  Asiya, as her parents always said, was “the strange one.” But it feels strange to call them my parents, she would say if she knew you very well, well enough to break out of the painful quietness or shyness, interpreted differently depending on the person, that defined her. Asiya had raised herself, she insisted—and this was basically true—she and her younger sister and even her younger brother: Willa, who had plateaued in the mid-five-hundred-pound range in her mid-teens and was bedridden in a wheel-equipped iron bed, and Zachary, who was a complete insomniac with a remarkably low IQ. She was parent to the most undesirable children she could imagine. If love produced them, she thought, fuck love. But somehow she doubted it was love exactly.

  Her parents: father, Bryce McDonald, CTO and senior vice president of engineering, operations, and technology for the Boeing Company, who lived in Chicago; mother, Shell Hooper, New York socialite and onetime air stewardess for Pan Am, who lived in Zurich. They had divorced when Asiya was twelve, the age when she’d supposedly begun homeschooling, but that was really the age she’d been when Shell left the family (first stop: psychiatric hospital; second stop: rehab; third stop: rehab; fourth stop: rehab; fifth stop: commune; sixth and final stop: Hawaii, with eight dogs, three horses, two live-in partners, and their four almost-stepchildren).

  Back then she was not Asiya; she was “Daisy,” the real name she through-and-through hated. But that Daisy McDonald was a true child of New York City. After years of the Barton School—Lower, Middle, all of K–7—an all-girls independent school located on the Upper East Side (tuition: $28,000 a year), she became an adult, an adult with access to a trust fund, a mother-sister, and, in some ways, a woman, a woman-child. She did what any New York rich girl in her position would do: she went to clubs, she drank and smoked and took drugs, she slept with older men. She managed this all while being incorrigibly shy. This was what she called her Ignorant Bliss Era.

  She was bound to burn out on it, that she knew the whole time. But she kept waiting for something to take her out of it, something to fill the hole, another tug in another direction, and then it came.

  It came in the form of religion. God came.

  It began with Patrick, one of her exes—a senior publicist at a high-powered fashion PR house, whom she always suspected was gay—who turned her on to Buddhism. And she tried it and fell in love with it, and then after a season she began to find holes, that it was full of holes—all holes, even—just too bleak for her still hopeful heart, and that this god left her more empty-feeling than the lack of a god altogether. Months later, she met another guy who dabbled in Hare Krishna ideology, an artist whose name she could never remember, not then nor now, and she was fascinated but eventually found the whole thing—all the freakish superpowered animals and their supernatural feats and the Technicolor paintings and madcap mantras—entirely too psychedelic, making her feel somehow conservative, practical, and black-and-white-souled by comparison. As an insult, he mentioned she’d make a good Catholic, though that had its imagery, too. Still, she took Catholicism on for a season, even attending church, until she decided that she, hater of all authority, could never stand for its hierarchies—plus, sometimes at night her mind played Sinead O’Connor’s Saturday Night Live pope-photo-tearing appearance over and over and over in a loop.

  She kept wearing these religions, taking them on and off as though they were a style choice, until she got to Islam. Against all odds, it was there that Daisy McDonald found her match.

  She went to a mosque in Brooklyn, where men and women sat separated, where she found her hair suddenly bound beneath a scarf, where they ate and drank and sang and cried all on their knees. She soon became enamored with a Moroccan graffiti artist named Moe—short for Mohammed—who joked that since he had Americanized his name, it only made sense that she should Arabicize hers. And so he took the letters of her name, tagged it over and over in all sorts of incarnations, and finally stumbled on Asiya.

  She mouthed it slowly. AWE-see-yah. The word required a mostly open mouth, barely touching down for sibilance’s sake—unlike her own name, which almost required a clenched jaw or at least an insincere smile. Asiya was all sorts of things Daisy was not: velvet, ebony, forest, avian, paranormal. Asiya was beautiful.

  What does it mean? she asked.

  He shrugged. Hell if I know.

  She looked it up. It was apparently Arabic for “healer,” a caretaker of the ailing, something she never was and never could imagine being, though her future would involve all sorts of ailing people like Willa—who was just about to be resigned to a bed—and Zal, who was the most miraculous of handicapped people. Asiya was one of the four most sacred women of Islam, the Pharaoh’s Israelite wife, who adopted Moses after servants found him afloat in a crate upon the Nile. In the end, Asiya incurred the wrath of the Pharaoh with her monotheism. She was tortured and killed by the Pharaoh but was also among the first women to enter heaven for believing in one God. Her story was part tragedy, part triumph.

  Daisy took on the name Asiya with a solemn appreciation, and just as she became Asiya, everything began to change. She began to digest the world differently, she began to take it in and turn it out in a whole other manner. She began, she felt, to be in control of the world in a way. It did not alarm her, but rather seemed logical: taking in God as a true believer, becoming one of them from heart to appellation, had to be intense. The story was being written from scratch, her whole universe was being created before her. Perspective was the least of the benefits Asiya McDonald was due to acquire.

  She had her name legally changed.

  Eventually Moe broke her heart by giving in to his parents’ choice for a girlfriend, who soon became his wife, a beautiful also-Moroccan girl named Ayesha, who eyed Daisy—Asiya—with only suspicion. But really, Ayesha would prod, what made you come here? Why did you want to be one of us?

  Asiya didn’t know what to say exactly. I think I love Islam, she said, with less certainty than she wished was true.

  Without Moe, she began trying to get to know more men from the mosque, hanging out after prayer meetings and following them to local cafés. She got a reputation at the mosque as the white girl who was trying to get their men. She once heard a friend of Ayesha’s say loudly in English: The little she-devil thinks this is a man-whore-house! But they all know she can’t compete.

  And apparently it was true.
While she fascinated many of the men at first, her cloying presence, like a department store fragrance one gets showered with at the urging of the perfume counter lady, soon became too much for them. There were only a couple white men there at the time and no white women except for her. A few started to wonder what her business was, if there was something more sinister. But most just found her annoying, parasitic, lost, and desperate. They felt it was more new company, not God, that she craved, even though she would vehemently deny it when they’d suggest it with a leading ­question or two.

  Years later, no longer Muslim, but not willing to abandon that beautiful name, she would still deny it. The men were part of the package, but it was God that held all the allure for her. Even though her stint as a Muslim believer had lasted just over a year, she missed believing in something, or at least trying to.

  And she credited Islam for being what opened her to something greater, made her suddenly a receptacle for visions of sorts. It was during the time she was studying the Koran that she started have feelings about things, to the point that she would call them premonitions. If it weren’t blasphemous to imply it, she’d say that she became a Muslim mystic and then simply a mystic. That gift did not leave her, no matter what God she held on to.

  And yet at the end of millennium, when the Season of Fear came over them all, that was her thought: that they were all in it as deeply as her—so strongly, so unsubtly, she did not know how to feel any more than anyone else did. She became obsessed with it, but what was It? It was formless, a great question mark, a blurry unknown. Something, they said, was going to happen. What? She went through various stages of attraction and revulsion at the very thought of It, but the stage she was in when Zal met her manifested itself physically and most innocuously: under her sleeve was a cross, a Star of David, and an Allah pendant, symbols of nothing she believed in but of a prudent just-in-casery, an acknowledgment of a world where anything is possible. She wore them on a chain around her wrist, a most apt place, she thought, for such symbols to be bound.

  Zal, of course, saw none of this—just a plain figure, very thin, barely a girl, a black-and-white scrawl no more adorned than a classic stick figure, pale face wrapped in a black hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans and sneakers—when they met on December 31, 1999, in broad daylight on a sidewalk near Zal’s apartment. He had seen that black figure drop to her knees before him, as if in collapse, and he had stopped. But she was examining something, kneeling over some object of interest on the sidewalk, a black thing.

  It took Zal more than a few moments before he realized it was a dead bird.

  Zal had been tossing coins all day—heads, tails, heads, tails—about Silber’s NYE party. So the first thing that crossed his mind: not going.

  Next thing: horror.

  He couldn’t remember what sound he made, but he knew he made some sound; Asiya, on the other hand, never forgot it: the highest-pitched scream she had ever heard a human let out, something that suited an animal almost.

  It had made her do something she didn’t do much: raise her voice.

  She had gone from a decorous “relax” to a volcanic “RELAX NOW! IT’S ALL RIGHT!!!”

  Her hand on his sleeve had silenced him. This woman, not Hendricks, not a Vegas usher, not Silber or even Indigo, but a total complete stranger, a total complete stranger woman, had made contact with him.

  When he appeared to truly relax, nodding away as if in acquiescence as well as apology, she had reached into the black backpack that was casually slung over one shoulder, removed a Tupperware container, and proceeded, with a plastic fork, to push the tiny black bird in there.

  Zal had immediately closed his eyes, lest he should lose control again. “Are you done?” he asked. “Are you done yet?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I should explain: I use them. For work.”

  Zal had paused—a million sentences ran through his head—and then proceeded to blurt: “And what is that . . . work?” He was terrified to know the answer.

  She had looked down at the sidewalk where the bird had been, where not even its blood marked where its body had been, not a trace of it at all. “I do art.”

  “I hate art,” Zal had immediately said, for reasons he could not understand. It was a pure lie, and maybe one of those instances Rhodes spoke of, a moment without impulse control, words that came not from his conscious mind but from something connected to something only Rhodes knew about. “I mean, I’m not good artist. I’d probably like it. I would like to do it. Maybe one day. It sounds interesting, I think.”

  She had shrugged. This girl was not so friendly, he was realizing. But then again, he had probably insulted her.

  But her mind was elsewhere. “It’s weird,” she said, “that bird fell out of nowhere—not a tree, not a shrub even, just a Duane Reade awning and a newsstand, overhead. I wonder how it got here. There wasn’t any blood.”

  “Maybe it was just sleeping?” Zal suggested.

  And that made her snort, the closest she came to laughter those days. “Maybe! Well, not anymore!”

  Zal gulped—in his mind, he imagined one of those horror movies where a man is buried alive. He blinked it away and focused on her unblinking dark eyes.

  “What do you do with them in your art?” Zal asked, again not at all interested in the answer. There was nothing else to talk about but the worst things, it seemed.

  She had rolled her eyes, at herself mostly, but to Zal it seemed aimed at him, and so he looked down, ashamed.

  “I bring them back to life, of course.”

  She had something like a smile on, if a girl like that could even smile.

  His eyes grew wide at that, his heart raced. You have no idea what that means to me, he wanted to say, if you’re serious. She probably wasn’t, he thought, but what if. He nodded, trying to stay composed. Words went through his head—for a second zombie, quickly replaced by prophet. He imagined her with a halo and thought it would suit her.

  He felt compelled to know her. “My name is Zal. Nice to meet you,” he muttered, as he always did when in one of those rare circumstances of people meeting, mimicking the niceties of people in old-fashioned movies.

  “Asiya,” she said, also not offering her hand. “Nice to meet you too, I guess.”

  Zal did not meet people. Assuming Rhodes was right and Zal was just barely teenage when he entered his twenties, Hendricks did not want to take many risks, so he had just barely in the past few years begun to give Zal his own life. He had set up Zal with his own apartment—even though he slept there a few times a week at first—and started letting him go places alone, like that Vegas trip. Outside of Hendricks, Zal knew almost no one. At that time, he and Hendricks had just been discussing his getting a job.

  Asiya also did not meet people—mainly because she didn’t like to.

  And so Asiya never quite figured out why she did it—it was a crazy time, the last day of the millennium; that could be her excuse, or perhaps her newfound fear that felt almost like a clairvoyance, an anxiety that felt almost psychic in frequency, pushed her to it, who knows—but she said, “Would you like to take a walk?”

  Zal had nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to badly. He was going absolutely nowhere.

  So much had happened in that end of the millennium, that insane Y2K season: Silber, for one thing. He had come within inches of something called flight, something called magic, or riffs on them at best, total shams at worst. He had nonetheless made a friend, managed to make something like a friendship with someone whom most people would have no access to. His story had done it.

  And here was a human with no idea of his story. It was his first pure contact with a person ever.

  thin. She looked sick. Her skin was very white, like his, but in a way that implied maybe she had not been born like that; it also looked sick. Her eyes were small, black, and beady and her face oval and austere, almost entirely androgynous. Her hair, jet black, was cut like a boy’s, and her curves nearly nonexistent.

  If not
for her voice, he may not have known she was a girl. Her small whisper of a voice was by far the most feminine thing he’d ever heard. It made him think of the sound flower petals might make rubbed against each other. There was a sibilance to everything, a delicacy and fragility that Zal was man enough to understand meant female. He liked that voice very much, loved being in the company of that sweet, wispy voice of hers. He thought about telling her how much he liked it, but he wasn’t sure if that was something normal humans did at this stage or even a thing a girl like that would like—she probably wanted to sound more like a boy, like him.

  He also liked that she seemed unable to tell that there was anything off with him. When he ordered a vegetable soup and tea, she said she would like the same. He blushed when she did that, felt a great degree of pride.

  He also noticed she never smiled. He found it comforting in someone who was not, say, his father, whose smile and laughter he loved and felt downright sheltered by, even if he couldn’t return it. For a moment he wondered: could she be like him?

  She couldn’t. He would have known the story. Rhodes and Hendricks had filled him with all the dozens in history and around the globe—mostly, he thought, in an effort to make him feel less like an anomaly.

  But he knew there was something different in her. Certainly something people would see as wrong. But he didn’t, couldn’t—how could he?

  “What?” she was saying in that voice, over and over.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I was just lost in my thoughts. Did you say something?”

  She shook her head. She looked down at a big black digital wristwatch.